Best Web Hosting 2006

The WHIR’s March web host magazine issue arrived at my door the other day. This is one of the few hard copy magazines that gets circulation within the web hosting industry. This month’s issue was about marketing in the web hosting industry.

In there they usually have an interview with the head of some web hosting company or a dedicated server company. This month’s issue featured Brent Oaxley from HostGator. I have known Brent for several years having been competitors once way back and he is a good guy. HostGator is a quality web hosting company and Brent and everyone down there do good work. HostGator was located in Florida and has since moved to Texas.

One of the new shining examples from 2006 was a company called HostMonster. This company made a huge splash by offering unlimited domain hosting. HostMonster has a terrific uptime record, they offer 24×7x365 support by phone and email.

The Hostmonster package is large enough to more web sites than any webmaster we have interviewed who uses their system so you really cannot ever run out of disk space or bandwidth while trying to build your unlimited sites.

We still recommend Hostmonster highly in our bestwebhosting2008.com site and they have been in the #1 spot there as recently as January 2008. In addition HostMonster was our #1 overall pick for 2007 and has an opportunity to repeat this year as well.

Looking back on 2006 and how we have taken down our rankings and reviews we thought it was important to reflect on which host had the best year in 2006. There were tons of competitors for our top 10 list and obviously because there were only 10 spots there were a number of good web hosts, along with plenty of lousy web hosts, which did not make our list.

Overall for the year 2006 Bluehost was our consistent top choice, not only for our web developers who were out testing all of the hosting companies but through all of the user reviews, good and bad, Bluehost for the year had the most consistency.

Bluehost is out of Orem Utah, they own their own data facilities, offer exceptional phone, chat & email support 24×7x365 and they offered a terrific plan back in 2006 where you can host 6 web sites on 1 plan. They have since upgraded that plan to an unlimited addon domain package.

Bluehost continues to rank well in our bestwebhosting2008.com site and maintains a very good support and service reliability.

Hello anyone,

My name is Marge and along with a bunch of other dedicated and part time (but also very dedicated) webmasters we created the bestwebhosting2006.com site to tell you about what was happening in web site hosting in 2006. FYI we also have moved on to report information about web hosting in 2007 & web hosting in 2008.

2006 was a wild ride for many of us in web site hosting as we saw the emergence of the super large web hosting companies go out & just try to acquire as much business as they possibly could through completely unjustified plan increases and mind boggling discounts to new customers.

Some of the more notable companies that we see as emerging in the market as leaders are well known names like: Lunarpages, Bluehost, Startlogic and Dot5Hosting.

As we try to recreate some of the driving forces behind web hosting in 2006 we will see many references to these companies as well as others who also tried to stay competitive but without sacrificing so much integrity for their system environments.

So begins a reflection of 2006 web hosting,

Marge